If I Could Tell

In alternating first-person accounts, two primary and two secondary characters 'speak' the fictional narrative of If I Could Tell. As the title suggests, doubt is implicit in the narrative; there is no impediment, necessarily, to the story being told - 'I could tell it, if .. .' - but, rather, doubt about telling (from the characters' perspective) where the truth lies. An accumulation of first-person revelations forms, in four parts, an altogether more contestable version of the lives, thoughts and impulses of two 'siblings' Jessica (Jess) Morell and William (Willow) Morell/Osborne, a 'hitchhiker', Luna Fortune, and a nurse, Clare. In authoring themselves, each revealing a telling truth but misperceiving what is wholly true, they simultaneously create the narrative that, beyond their power, draws them together, then alienates them. As Luna says - essentially of the difficulty of deciding whether or not Willow is 'a nice guy' - 'My point being, you can't always tell how a story turns out for the person who's listening, because you can't tell what they're hearing, what the story means, because of stuff that's happened to them or stuff they know.' And the crisis of the novel lies at this nexus, the convergence of 'stuff that's happened' and 'stuff (the characters think) they know'. Plot and structure function together in exploring the limits and consequences of this intractability. Willow and Jess are the son and daughter of Frances and Alfred Morell, an airman reported missing in action in a distant conflict when they are infants, but a presence in their lives and their imaginations. After an obscure political upheaval compels them to move from the river settlement of their early years to the city to live with Alfred's unmarried brother, Geoffrey, the promise of a wholesome upbringing fades with a despairing Frances succumbing to drink. Through an accident of circumstance, her decline is associated with a serious injury Jess suffers in falling from a tree and, in the course of her recovery, the budding of an unnaturally intimate relationship with Willow. This intimacy comes to an incestuous climax on the night of their mother's burial, all but destroying their bond. They are estranged for some two decades. By the time they meet again as adults at Geoffrey's funeral, all the most important details of their relationship and their life story are found to be false or flawed - though neither of them knows the full extent. Only Jess knows that Willow is not in fact her brother, his own father having died at the time of her conception, and Willow is alone in knowing that Alfred Morell's fate is critically at odds with the lore they grew up with. As they begin their long journey home in Willow's car, each of them is privately transfixed by the risks and challenges of sorting truth from falsehood, and sealing the rapprochement they long for. Neither foresees the deranging impact of their glancing contact with Luna. The narrative is deliberately placed in an unnamed setting in the hope of freeing it from the burdens of a given history and the reflex associations that inevitably arise from assumptions of prior knowledge. The work is not entirely free, however, from a late-20th century backdrop of ideological contest and transition in which the tropes of personal and public accountability are discernible in the tension between the characters' private and social worlds. Their apparent willingness to discount the wider setting in favour of a more intimate order of interests seems often delusional, and is arguably akin to the author's evasive intentions. The three most prominent characters all have torments to reckon with, each of them in its way originating in the churn of History, though seeming capable of being weighed on a subjective scale. Yet it is probably the social context that is, if murkily, the agency of dissonance in the characters' relations. It falls to Willow to discover - or to show, without necessarily being conscious of the demonstration - that personal and public pasts converge ineluctably, with unpredictable consequences. If I Could Tell is the distillation of a long process of reading and thinking, and four years of writing and extensive revision. The fifth and final draft reveals significant departures from the structure and character development of the first. Influences vary widely, but in thinking through the themes of engaging or evading the historical process, of placing the individual in the muddle if not always the middle, certain texts stand out for their imaginative reach and technical achievements, among them W G Sebald's Austerlitz, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, J M Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Tolstoy's novella-length short story Haji Murat, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Alain Robbe-Grillers The Erasers, Philip Roth's American Pastoral and, more recently, Martin Amis's House of Meetings. Throughout, I found myself returning to the notion expressed by the writer in Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, who says of his book, emerging 'quite different from what I had been trying to invent', that 'I wish it now to run freely, according to its bent, sometimes swift, sometimes slow; I choose not to foresee its windings'. Its appeal as a writerly credo comes, eventually, with the necessarily humble acknowledgement that doubt stimulated by perceptive supervision is an indispensable accompaniment.